The present invention relates generally to equipment design and production, and particularly, to a system and method for automatically nesting sheet metal parts for assembly and presenting the parts to a user over a network when the user orders equipment for manufacture.
In equipment manufacturing, nesting refers to the process of fitting together odd shaped parts on a sheet of material. It also includes placing small parts in the material cut out from larger parts. Typically, when a customer desires to order customized equipment for his or her business needs, the customer must first engage a sales person from the equipment manufacturer and provide the design specification including various configuration parameters for the equipment to fit the customer""s business needs to the sales person. The sales person then takes the configuration parameters and provides them to a design engineer who designs the equipment, typically with aid of CAD/CAM (computer-aided design/computer aided manufacturing) tools. If the customer approves the design plan, the plan is sent to the manufacturing plant where equipment is built according to its design specification. Typically, the manufacturing process includes nesting in which parts are placed or fit on a sheet of material. A user ordering the equipment, however, does not have an easy access to the sheets that are being nested, and does not have control over which parts being placed on which material or sheet of material to be cut and assembled into equipment.
Accordingly, it is desirable to allow the user to view the sheet nesting mechanism and to specify parameters used in nesting such that the user may have control and interaction over the nesting mechanism. Preferably, the user is allowed to view and specify various parameters that affect the nesting, on-line and when the user configures the equipment for order.
Yet further, it is desirable to have a system that allows the nested parts information to be seamlessly transmitted to a laser or any other sheet cutting machine to begin the actual cutting process.
A web interface allows users to order customized equipments based on the customer supplied design specifications and also displays individual parts information associated with the equipment ordered. When a user enters an identifier for the order, the method and system of the present invention automatically generates individual parts that comprise the ordered equipment. The parts are then displayed on the user""s web page. In one embodiment, nesting of parts is automatically initiated wherein the required parts are optimally placed on a sheet of steel for laser programs to cut the parts.
In one aspect, user is allowed to specify a group of parts needed via a web interface. The parts are then automatically placed on a sheet of material such as steel to utilize the sheet optimally, and laser program is generated for cutting the parts.
Further features and advantages of the present invention as well as the structure and operation of various embodiments of the present invention are described in detail below with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the drawings, like reference numbers indicate identical or functionally similar elements.